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Acquired byMicrosoft
Price$100M
Date7/08
TermsCash

General Information
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Websitepowerset.com
Blogblog.powerset.com
CategoryWeb
Phone415-848-7000
Emailinfo@powerset.com
Employees60
Founded10/06

Offices
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[map] San Francisco, USA
475 Brannan St
San Francisco, CA, 94107
USA

People
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Barney Pell
Board / Founder / CTO
Eric Tilenius
Investor
Lorenzo Thione
Founder / Product Architect
Pejman Nozad
Investor
Scott Banister
Board of Directors
Scott Prevost
General Manager and Director of Product
Scott Prevost
General Manager and Director of Product
Scott Prevost
General Manager & Director of Product
Ron Kaplan
Chief Science Officer
Luke Nosek
Board of Directors

Funding
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Total$20.5M
Series A, 6/07
Foundation Capital
The Founders Fund
Scott Banister
Bezos Expeditions
$12.5M
Debt
$8M

Competitors
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Hakia, TextWise, ChaCha, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cuil, Blekko, JIxperts, Viewzi, Gloofi, Cognition Technologies

Service Providers
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SHIFT Communications

Tags
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searchengine, google, techcrunch40, natural-language

Powerset
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Powerset is a search engine that focuses on natural language processing. In other words, Powerset will not search based simply on keywords alone, but will try to understand the search phrase as a whole. The goal of the product is to make searching more “natural and intuitive.”

Powerset launched a limited showcase version of its site to the public in May 2008.

Powerset was acquired by Microsoft on 1st July 2008.

Videos

Above:

Powerset Demo video

Above:

HyveUp interview with Lorenzo Thione

Products
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Powerset
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Websitepowerset.com
Blogblog.powerset.com
Launch DateJune 11, 2007
Tags wiki
Powerset screenshot
Above: Powerset Screenshot -- #1

Traffic Analytics

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Livegraph

Compete

Powerset

Comments

sd - May 11, 2008 at 10:00pm
too much hype.
Arman - December 7, 2007 at 2:42pm
Dear colleagues, I red about Powerset in 2006. But I can not see the end of the project and it's like a trick. In any case something must be created to beat the google out. I'm already feed up with them. I'd like to see the Powerlab's functionality asap and get rid from the other search engines. Just a fresh air with fresh ideas... Best regards. Arman
Phrasebase - November 2, 2007 at 1:40pm
I just tried askwiki and irseek.com... absolute garbage results, nothing remotely close to what any of the leading search engines could find with the same query.
TheMain - November 2, 2007 at 9:25am
I got my invite to powerlabs and it's far from natural language processing. They are only allowing users to try 30 different query patterns that are categorized into three content domains. Users are only able to identify the subject of the query. That is NOT natural language processing... The best natural language processing is from askwiki so far: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/askwiki-wikiped.html
Elwyn Jenkins - September 19, 2007 at 9:31am
Looks good on face value. Can't wait to try it myself. Will recommend others once I can see what it is.
Leah Soleil - August 26, 2007 at 8:35am
Powerset sounds like a great opportunity for ONLINE MARKETERS to learn more about their target markets; but they seem to take it a step further and make it "extremely" easy to actually target the "specific" questions that customers are asking, in order to deliver them better solutions and find out what their issues are right from the source. Doing this 'natural meta' searching through video and audio media sounds very exciting! Looking forward to launch.

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Sources

  1. Microsoft to Acquire Powerset (powerset.com) [edit]
  2. powerset.com [edit]
  3. Ok, Now It’s Done. Microsoft To Acquire Powerset (techcrunch.com) [edit]
Edit This Page (Revision History)
Last Edited 8/28/08

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